The invention relates to legrests and particularly to legrests which are suitable for attachment to aircraft seats. Typically, such legrests are moved to their extended operating position by manually lifting them from their storage position and unfolding legs which mount the legrest at a fixed position above the floor. With many designs, the assistance of a flight attendant is often necessary, thus restricting the passenger's freedom to use or not to use the legrest at will. The design shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,264,103 can be easily manipulated by the user but still requires considerable bending effort on the part of the user and has several hinged members which must be unfolded. Various self-deployed legrest concepts are schematically disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,918,964. However, the required linkages extend over the major portion of the fore and aft space under the seat and would interfere with underseat storage. The mechanisms also have a very limited number of adjustment positions and would seem to require that the locking mechanism and linkages be fixedly mounted on the seat frame or arms, thus making operation somewhat difficult and making the design incompatible with existing seats. Where the structure is mounted in the seat armrest, the armrest would have to be fixed whereas on many aircraft seats the arms are pivotable to a storage position or can be lifted out of retaining sockets when their presence is not desired. The legrest also appears to be quite heavy since heavy torque loads which could be applied to either side during use would seem to require duplicate linkages on each side and interconnecting supports. The legrest apparently has an extension portion, but how it would be fabricated has not been explained. In some disclosed embodiments the extension is spring-loaded to an extreme position and thus could not be adjusted for user comfort.